While we followed Cerberus across what turned out to be a whole bunch of empty fields and rolling hills (Wyoming), I kept trying to surreptitiously glance toward Gaia. There was still so much I wanted to say to her. I knew it was impossible, of course. But that didn’t stop my traitorous brain from coming up with a crapton of what-if scenarios as it tried to convince me that there might be a way I could pull it off. Even if I was simply setting up a way for us to successfully rescue her in the present. My present, that was. I had no idea how that could be possible, or what I could say to her now that wouldn’t change things. What was I supposed to do, give her a sealed envelope with a note telling her to put a specific spell on herself that would automatically teleport her somewhere safe on this very specific day no matter where she was?

Yeah, I was still thinking about Back to the Future.

Beyond impossible and dangerous thoughts like that, there was still so much I wanted to ask her. There were things I’d never had the opportunity or the courage to say while she was still the headmistress, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t get the–

No, stop it, Flick. No thinking like that. Seeing Gaia now was just giving me wild and sometimes depressing thoughts that I had to shove out of my mind so I could focus on the task at hand. Namely, finding and saving Millersby. That was probably already pushing my luck as far as not changing the future went.

Gaia was looking at me pretty intently too, but that was probably okay. It wasn’t like she could figure out who I was by my current appearance. Not only had I shifted my hair color and facial features, but I looked male right now. She could spend the next several hundred years watching for someone who looked like I did currently and never actually figure it out. Though, considering this was Gaia we were talking about, I wasn’t totally convinced that she hadn’t known exactly who I was the moment I arrived at Crossroads and had just kept it to herself.

Yeah, now that I actually put words to that thought, I was giving it roughly coin flip odds. But still, even if she did immediately know the truth (or would immediately as soon as the future happened), I couldn’t do anything that would give away too much now. I couldn’t let her guess what would happen, couldn’t warn her.

If Avalon found out I’d had this opportunity and didn’t take it, she’d forgive me, right? She’d understand the whole changing the future thing and how dangerous it could be. Yeah, she’d forgive me. She’d understand. She was clever like that, and fun, and beautiful, and…

I missed Avalon. And Shiori. And–

“We are here.” Persephone’s words interrupted my thoughts, as she held her hand to stop me from advancing. “At least, we are at the edge of their defenses.”

We were standing in a very lightly wooded area, the ground covered with leaves and sticks. Ahead of us was a wide ditch with a small trickle of water running through it.

Cerberus had laid down and was chewing on a log with all three of his heads. As I looked around and took that in, Persephone indicated a rune carved into a nearby tree right at the edge of the ditch. “Do not cross that line unless you are very close to immortal. And you want their entire camp to know we are here.” Her smile brightened. “I am only one of those, so I shall stay on this side of it as well.”

Stepping up to the rune, I asked, “Um, do any of us know how to disable this thing? Because this stuff usually requires some pretty specific countermeasures.”

Percy, however, shook her head. “I recognize some of it, enough to know that crossing in front of it is a very bad idea. But I don’t know enough about it to even start taking it apart. And I am afraid that too much experimenting will set it off.”

Grimacing, I gave the thing another look. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Maybe we should just find another way in. Or wait for them to leave again, this place seems pretty dangerous. I mean, if they have a defensive rune this powerful right at the edge of their territory, who knows what they might have further in. These guys seem more dangerous than we thought. I don’t know if the three of us–sorry, four of us–” I added with a nod toward Cerberus. “–can handle this by ourselves. We should–”

At that moment, Gaia’s hand snapped past me with the glint of metal from the knife she was holding. Without hesitation or preamble, she cut through the rune. I felt a wave of shock and terror through me which completely vanished just as quickly.

Rocking backward on my heels, I blinked a few times as the feelings dissipated. “Okay, what the hell was that? Wait, that was the rune, wasn’t it? That thing was making us feel like we were out of our league, like we couldn’t handle what we were about to walk into. It was… like, a fear rune or something.”

“Something like that,” Gaia confirmed with a thoughtful frown. “I’ve seen its like before. Not that specific one, but close enough for me to guess how it worked. You… have my apology for allowing it to affect you for so long. It took me a moment to look for any additional traps attached to it.”

With that said, she looked back to me curiously. “That spell was quite rare and powerful, at least far as I’ve seen. What sort of pirates, even those who come from the sky, would possess such skill? Particularly for it to affect both of you so deeply. And for it to be one neither of you recognized.”

Grimacing a bit, I shook my head. “With this sort of thing you never know. What’s incredibly super-rare and unique here on Earth might be average somewhere else. It’s just one of those things. Maybe these pirates, or one of them anyway, comes from a place where that rune is taught to little kids.” After a moment, I added, “Or maybe they really do have an incredibly powerful mage with them. We should be careful.”

Now that the spell was disabled, we continued on very carefully. I sent a few ghosts forward to watch for anything, though I was careful to make sure none of them were anyone Gaia might recognize in the future. They were all strangers to her, people drawn from the haunted forest where the buried coffin and tape recorder had been. That seemed to be the best choice, since as far as I knew, there was no way for Gaia of the future to have ever met them. They were ghosts in that forest and now they were with me.

There were more traps and alarms along the way. We were definitely getting closer to wherever these people were holed up, judging by the amount of effort that was being put into trying to keep us away. And just as Gaia had noted, it was done with more skill and power than I would have expected from some random pirates. It made me wonder if there was something more going on here. After all, it would hardly be the first time I’d started out supposedly investigating something relatively mundane, only to end up in the middle of a much bigger problem. One example of that would be… well, my entire life, really.

Still, I had to keep trying to rescue Millersby. I had already promised to do everything I could, and I wasn’t about to walk away just because this might be getting more complicated than I’d expected. Especially with Gaia here, forcing me to tread as lightly as possible. Really, by this point, something being unexpectedly complicated should have been completely expected.

In any case, I eventually made sure my ghosts were invisible as they scouted ahead through the scattered trees, just in case. There wasn’t a lot of cover for them to hide behind, since this wasn’t exactly a forest or a field. It was somewhere in between. Either way, the ghosts were as undetectable as possible. Which turned out to be a good thing because they identified no less than three watchtowers hidden within several of those scattered trees. I had ghosts move in as close as possible, then looked through their eyes to see what we were dealing with. The people in them (two to each tree-tower) were a mix of species, none of them human. They wore camouflage clothing and were using what looked like binoculars pieced together from bits of technology scavenged from a modern day junkyard. Maybe they had taken parts of another ship or something? They were pirates, after all. The platforms also each had a large cannon attached to a generator of some sort, clearly meant for taking down very strong targets, a couple smaller rifles resting nearby, and a slightly glowing crystal ball on a gold stand that I couldn’t figure out the use of.

Stolen story; please report.

With the advance warning of where those lookouts were, we crouched down in a small, natural ditch and focused on what we were going to do about this whole thing. “We could sneak past them,” I pointed out, “but that’s probably a bad idea.”

“Indeed,” Gaia agreed. “Even if that is successful, it would put enemies at our backs. The best move is to eliminate them quietly, one tree at a time before they can sound any alarm.”

“Nope, sorry.” That was Percy, shaking her head. “We can’t do that. I mean, one at a time without them knowing, that is.” She focused on me. “You said there were crystal balls on each platform?”

Checking through the eyes of one of my invisible ghosts once more, I nodded. “Yeah, the orbs are about the size of a bowl…” I paused then. I had been about to say bowling ball, but of course, Gaia wouldn’t know what that was. And I wasn’t entirely certain that Percy would either, for that matter. So, I quickly amended by holding my hands out to demonstrate. “They’re about this big. The gold stands have three feet at the bottom shaped like bird talons, and there’s runic writing up the length.”

Percy was nodding when I opened my eyes. “Uh huh, that’s what I thought. The orbs are linked to each other. If anything goes wrong at one of the stands, they’ll all know about it. The only way to do it is to hit them all at the same time. But there’s three of us!” Belatedly, she patted one of Cerberus’s heads. “Four, but he doesn’t do stealthy very well.” That was immediately followed by a quick apology as Cerberus grumbled. “Awww, I’m sorry, but you’re good at so many other things. Being quiet just isn’t one. It’s okay though, everyone’s got their flaws.”

“We might have a bigger problem than that,” I pointed out, before focusing on my ghosts once more. That time, I sent them out further, in a wide circle around the area we were closing in on. Sure enough, a minute later, I sighed. “Yeah, there’s actually seven of these stands all around this area. So whether there’s three or four of us doesn’t matter.” As soon as I said that, my head shook. “Wait what am I saying? There’s not just four of us. I’ve got the extras. Percy, uh, Gaia, could you each handle one of those stands?”

Gaia, for her part, raised an eyebrow. “Are you quite certain about this?”

My head bobbed. “Yeah, trust me. With my ghosts, I outnumber these guys by like thirty to one. Just let me get everyone in position.”

So, we got set up. Gaia said she could actually handle two of the stands. Which, knowing what I did about her, I was almost certain she could have handled more than that without much trouble. Hell, maybe she could’ve dealt with all of them and was just trying to leave us something to do. Or maybe she wasn’t certain about handling them quietly. She had been Morgan Le Fey before, and from what I knew, ‘subtlety’ wasn’t one of her strong points at the time. As the headmistress, that was different, but she was still a few hundred years out from that. Plus, she might’ve been holding back a bit because the whole spaceship thing was still relatively new to her. Between that and wanting to see what we were capable of, she had plenty of reason not to completely cut loose right here.

Anyway, she was going to handle two of them, and moved to the left to get ready for that. Percy, meanwhile, moved closer to the third tower, using an invisibility spell to stay out of sight. Even then, she didn’t get right up to it, moving just close enough that she could get up the tree and into the stand in an instant with her Seosten boost. Cerberus stayed down in the ditch, watching those two with a pair of his heads, while the third remained locked on me to see what I was going to do. Not that he would see much, since my physical body’s contribution to the situation was to remain completely still and silent as I closed my eyes and directed my ghosts into position. Just to be on the safe side, I was putting ten separate ghosts onto each stand, and giving them all enough power to make sure this was done quickly and quietly. For the latter, one of the ghosts I sent to each tower was holding a stone with a silencing spell on it. I did the same for the towers the other two were handling, just in case. That would ensure that no sound that came over the next few seconds would reach the pirate base itself.

Finally, we were ready. I waited for the signal from the other two, which came in the form of a quiet woof from Cerberus. That was his job. His heads were watching all three of us at the same time, and he woofed when we were ready. The second that happened, I gave my ghosts the go-ahead. Instantly, they activated the silencing spells and attacked the figures on the watchtowers. At the same time, Percy took off running, her figure a completely invisible blur as she went straight up the tree and caught her two targets by the back of their necks. And Gaia didn’t exactly lag behind. Though she didn’t physically throw herself that way like Percy did. Instead, she produced a single arrow between two fingers and tossed it forward through a portal that she summoned with her other hand. As the arrow passed through, it multiplied into several dozen versions of itself, each coming through a separate portal the woman had summoned, all at slightly different angles surrounding the four people spread across her two towers. The arrows cut them down instantly, hitting them from every direction and dropping the Alters like sacks of potatoes.

I also saw Gaia’s own aura flare to life in that moment. So she was a Boscher Heretic right now. I’d been curious about the timing of that.

Meanwhile, my ghosts handled the rest of them. The poor guards had no idea what hit them. One second they were just fine, and the next they were being set upon by a bunch of invisible dead things. It almost made me feel bad, especially considering we didn’t know exactly what was going on here. But I couldn’t take any chances. They had to go down as quickly and silently as possible. Whatever the full story was, finding Millersby was the important thing here. These people were pirates, why would they even take him? With any luck, we would find out very soon.

From what we could tell, we had managed to take these guys down without alerting anyone else. Everything was quiet in the distance, without any sign of an alert going up. Not that that was definitive proof, considering we still weren’t sure exactly where their base was, but still. At least we weren’t being attacked. It looked like we were clear to keep going.

As we were about to do that, however, Percy jumped down the tree she had been in, holding something bright and colorful. It was a blue and gold sash with some Latin writing it that read, ‘Only To Our Own Selves Is The Truth Owed.’

“Here, Cerberus!” She cheerfully announced while holding it up for the suddenly-excited robo-dog to see. “I know you were sad because you didn’t get to help, but you did help! You helped us know when we were all ready to go. You’re a valuable member of this team.” With that, she hooked the sash around his middle head. “I bet we can find two more of these too.”

I started to smile at that. “Yeah, if one of those guys had one, we can probably–wait a minute.” There was a sharp tugging sensation in my head and I closed my eyes before sending my consciousness inward. I knew that tug. It was from Shyel, my mental copy of Chayyiel. She had been pretty quiet recently, only appearing in my subconscious now and then. From what the actual Chayyiel had said, this version of her was a temporary one. It wasn’t intended to last forever, and now that we were past that whole situation with Fossor that she’d been helping prepare me for, Shyel was saving herself for emergencies, situations she thought only her knowledge could possibly help. Which, considering the resources I generally had to call on at all times, including Doctor Manakel, didn’t happen all that often.

But she was summoning me right now. She wasn’t even waiting until I was asleep. That had to mean that something about that sash was something pretty obscure. And dangerous.

As soon as I appeared in the mental forest she trained me in, I immediately called out, “What’s going on? Why’d you need–gah!” I had been turning in a circle, only to find the girl directly behind me when I came back around. She’d appeared out of nowhere.

“Sorry,” Shyel quietly apologized before staring up at me rather intently. “ But you need to know. That sash, the one that guard had, it’s a Seosten sash, one they give out to the first crew of a ship after it launches. And that one was only given out to one ship. The one that eventually became the Pale Ship.”

“Wait,” I found myself blurting, “you mean the ship that was caught on the outskirts of the spell that Tabbris the Elder used to turn his paradise planet invisible? The ship that’s been traveling all over the galaxy on its own since the crew and all their descendants are like… erased from the memory of everyone they interact with the moment they stop interacting with them? But why would some random pirate have one of their sashes?”

“That,” Shyel informed me, “is a very good question.”